In order for an operating system to be installed on a computer hard disk, partitions must be placed upon sectors of the disk by an operating system such as DOS.RTM.. Such file systems typically present the user with a list of known partitions and request the user to select an existing partition or create a new partition. In order to create a new partition, the user must delete existing partitions to create sufficient free space prior to creating a new partition, and thereby risk deleting all files in an active partition. Programs such as FDISK.TM. assist users, through text based interfaces, in creating or deleting partitions and creating extended partitions with logical drives and setting the active partition. Although such programs provide user prompts and display disk format data in table form, they do not provide users with easily comprehendible and manipulable representation of the disk format, such as a graphical representation of free disk space and unused partitions.